"They got little hands and little eyes, And they walk around tellin' great big lies, Don't want no short people 'round here."—"Short People," misunderstood 1978 song by Randy Newman.
Zut alors! Americans are getting shorter, according to Paul Krugman in his op-ed column, "America Comes Up Short," today in the New York Times.
The data show that Americans, who in the words of a recent paper by the economic historian John Komlos and Benjamin Lauderdale in Social Science Quarterly, were “tallest in the world between colonial times and the middle of the 20th century,” have now “become shorter (and fatter) than Western and Northern Europeans. In fact, the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries.”...The Dutch are now the world’s tallest people, almost three inches taller, on average, than non-Hispanic American whites. The U.S. ended up in 20th place, below Poland, Portugal and Hungary, but ahead of Britain.
Revealing digression. It gets worse. The study finds that rich Americans are shorter than rich Western Europeans. This revelation has caused an increase in the free-floating anxiety that is the default mood permeating The Scout Report offices. The refrigerator is stocked with serotonin jello shots, which, when consumed collectively, temper the "morning terror, to say nothing of abstract furies and
desultory lusts for strangers." Currently, the TSR intern is researching the definition of "rich." Meanwhile, as a diversion, the rest of the editors are compiling a list of short Americans whom we love. So far, Leslie "Brother Boy" Jordan (4-feet-11), Verne "Mini-Me" Troyer (2-feet-11), and Danny "Throw Momma From the Train" DeVito (5-feet-0). We invite our readers to submit their favorites, but Tolkien dwarfs are not eligible.
Jarring juxtaposition. Following Krugman's commentary today is one by David Brooks, which has the potential to render the Komlos-Lauderdale study irrelevant. (TSR assumes that the irony of pairing these two editorials is lost on the Times.) In "The National Pastime," Brooks laments what he believes is the inevitability of a genetically engineered human race and cites the proliferation of online gene pools as ominous evidence.
At this very moment thousands of people are surfing the Web looking for genetic material so their children will be nothing like me. They are looking through files at sperm bank sites with Jetson-like names such as Xytex, which have become the new eBays for offspring...They allow you to browse through page after page of donor profiles, comparing weight, noses, personality and what one site calls “tannability.”...When given this kind of freedom of choice, people seem to want to produce athletic Aryans with a passion for housekeeping. There is tremendous market demand for DNA from blue-eyed, blond-haired, 6-foot-2 finely sculpted hunks who roast their own coffee...In any case, a Harris poll suggested that more than 40 percent of Americans would use genetic engineering to upgrade their children mentally and physically.
Granted, the Xytex Web site is a little creepy and did frighten the already rattled TSR staff, with its "Creating Families Through Innovation" tagline and tinkly rendition of the first few bars of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." On the other hand, won't the ability to predetermine height solve this slowly developing, but no less insidious, anthropometric crisis. If not, could human shrinkage be the new global warming? Consider the havoc a race of shorter humans could reek on the fashion and design industries in, oh, say, a thousand years.
Meanwhile, while TSR sees the gene pool roiling with possibility, Brooks frets that if nature triumphs over nurture, "You could have two lesbian bikers giving birth to Mitt Romney." We have no idea what that means, so it's back to the kitchen for another serotonin jello shot.
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